Brian Rooney, a state labor economist, used unemployment insurance records to track what happened to workers laid off after the recession uprooted the industry.

It employed 7,700 people at its peak in 2005. Four years later, nearly 80 percent of its workforce was gone.

Rooney found that of the 7,300 people on RV manufacturing payrolls in the fall of 2007, fewer than 900 remained in the industry by the same time in 2011.

Some found new jobs. Others vanished from state unemployment benefits records.

About 3,800 people, just more than half of the workers, were working elsewhere by 2011. More than 1,000 had landed at other manufacturers. Another group of workers had landed at temporary staffing firms. Some even found work at auto dealerships or healthcare providers.

Yet the new jobs meant a pay cut for many. The median of the workers' hourly wages fell 12.8 percent, from $14.55 to $12.90, from 2007 to 2011.

It isn't clear how thousands of counterparts fared. More than one-third of the former RV manufacturing employees had disappeared from state unemployment records altogether by 2011.

That can happen for several reason: people may move out of state, become self-employed, or find farm work, which isn't covered by unemployment insurance. Or people may have been out of work for so long that they ran out of jobless benefits.